


Soul Bound

by cosplayermadness



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Weddings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23850259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosplayermadness/pseuds/cosplayermadness
Summary: Soulmates are found with a very special spell performed on a person’s 25th birthday with a strand of their hair, a bit of their blood, and a single tear from their eye to signify that they are willing to work hard for their love until they are old with no hair, and that sadness will leave them once they join as one as a couple. Sadly, for Sam, he never did the spell. Until now. 35 and feeling compelled to now that his brother was ready to marry his own soulmate, Sam walked into the Charlotta full of hope, and only a little doubt.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Gabriel/Sam Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Soul Bound

Soulmates are found with a very special spell performed on a person’s 25th birthday with a strand of their hair, a bit of their blood, and a single tear from their eye to signify that they are willing to work hard for their love until they are old with no hair, and that sadness will leave them once they join as one as a couple. Sadly, for Sam, he never did the spell. His first love, Jessica, died before her 23rd birthday, a full six months before his own. After the tragic death, he couldn’t bear to go through with the ritual. She was the love of his life and as far as he was concerned, without her, he had no one romantic in his life. He didn’t need a spell to tell him that.

His brother, having done the ritual at their local witch’s home, found himself with a name in a language that no one could prove existed, let alone words at all. Sam thought the paper looked a lot like the one from the local business store, and the letters, a total accident. A fluke. Still, when Castiel comes into their lives years later and saw the papers his name is written down, it felt almost too good to be true.

He’s a little older than the general crowd that visits the  _ Charlotta _ but he’s not the oldest in the waiting room. The owners are two bubbly, firey haired and spirited women who sit him down across from them in a professionally clean and well decorated room, the younger of the two, Charlie, tapping away at a tablet as she checked off some items.

“So Rowena here does the spells for the recently turned quarter centurions,” she explained, “but it’s much harder to determine once a person is past that date. You’re 37 this year, correct?”

Sam nodded solemnly. It was the answer he didn’t want, but knew he would get from his online searches. “Yes, just last month.” He hoped it was one of those internet fueled hoaxes, like how glitter was made with turkey fat or that the earth was flat, but it seemed to be sadly true. He wasn’t going to find his soulmate. And with Dean and Castiel’s wedding coming up in a year, he was feeling more and more like he wouldn’t find anyone to be with, let alone a soulmate.

Rowena leaned over in her armchair to tap at the screen only to have Charlie glare at her. “It’s not impossible, though, dear boy. That’s what makes us different from other places.” She reaches behind her to wave her hand in a flourish, a small purple glass bottle flying off the shelf of potions behind her and into her hand in a flash. “I do the wee spell and Charlie here takes the information to find where this soulmate is, tracks then down, and contacts them on our client’s behalf. This way there’s no awkward searches online trying to find the right Jane Doe or John Smith.”

Sam nods as he listens to all the different package options they had, including a platinum one where the first date is included and if the pair get married, get a kick back from whomever they recommend to the service. It was definitely a different affair since his older brother got a $100 test in a small town north of Bethesda over fifteen years ago. Looking over at the cheapest part of the services listed, he caught the eye of the  **Copper Package** \- a contact profile with a coffee date on the top of the Seattle Space Needle and two way ferry trip for two - and thought it was perfect. He’d only been to Seattle once, and had only been there with Dean for such a short time, they barely had any coffee. Plus, it would be nice to not have to dress up so much on a date, unlike the last one his aunt and uncle decided to arrange for him at a steakhouse that required a black tie. He asked politely if there was only way he could pay half now and the other half upon contact, and Charlie had the paperwork printed and ready for signing in minutes.

Confident, he left Charlotta with some hope, and maybe a slightly too expensive coffee from the shop down the block.

Two weeks later, he stood back in Charlotta with his palms sweating, Rowena sitting across from him in a completely different room. Clinical in its furniture, the dark decor of the walls and floor were a wild mismatch that he was sure fit Rowena to a tee, watching her as she worked filling a small wooden bowl with herbs and crystals, uncorking the blood her assistant had drawn from his arm a few moments prior. “I’ve found that if you let the blood sit in honey for a few minutes,” she explained, mixing the now wet, disgusting looking mess, “it makes the bond sweeter. However, I’ve seen some witches use glucose.”

Sam chuckled nervously, anxious for the answers he was hoping for. “But you’re not a hack.”

“No, I am not. I’ve been doing this for over three hundred years, and how I’ve done it has changed a bit, but it’s never been wrong.”

“Three…. can I ask how old you are?”

“No, that would be rude.” She ground some egg shells in a mortar with a pessel, the powder meant to be for good luck in the search for the soulmate. “But I can tell you that Charlie is closer to your age than mine.”

Sam nodded, his mind reeling with this information. “And how long have you been together?”

“Who says we’re together?”

Sam shrugged, pulling a few strands from his head, frowning at the single grey hair he found in the other browns. “Just intuition I guess.”

Rowena shook her head, taking the hair. “Never mind that. Just one ingredient more,” she lifted the bowl to him over to the chair he was sitting in. “Think of the saddest day in your life, and cry a tear into the bowl.”

It wasn’t hard to picture it. His mother’s hand on his shoulder the day he saw both his father’s eyes and his girlfriend’s eyes close shut forever. He was working late that night and had sent his parents to take Jessica home from the airport when a drunk driver struck them. His mother never fully recovered from the incident, using a prosthetic leg and adaptive devices, as well as a broken heart at the loss of her soulmate. It was the day Sam swore he would never do the spell. A spell his mother convinced him to finally do.

“It’s time,” she said, trying to button the top buttons of her cardigan with stiff fingers. “I know you’re scared and I don’t blame you, but you can’t live your whole life in fear. I eventually got into a car again, didn’t I? Even when it threatened to take everything from me, I still got behind the wheel. And if I hadn’t, I never would have made the friends I did, right?” And she made a point.

His mother wouldn’t have started the WTA - the Widow’s Traveling Association - meeting hundreds of women from all over the United States and starting chapters of groups of widowed women (and more recently men) who bonded over monthly trips together all over the world. It was a fantastic job and it was what helped her bond with Castiel’s aunt Amara after she lost her own partner a decade prior.

He knew she was right, and as much as he hated her being right, he signed up for Charlotta’s wait list the next day. Thinking of how the saddest day of his life lead to him being here, now, was easy. The feeling that this was finally happening, less easy to feel.

The tear hit the mixture dead centre and as Rowena put the bowl down on the stainless steel table, it began to grow a faint purple. “That’s normal, Samuel, it’ll start to glow pink in a moment.” Except it didn’t glow pink, instead the mixture caught fire, purple flames giving way to orange, then fizzling out just as quickly. “Huh, that’s never happened be-“

A loud bang and a blast emitted from the bowl, both of them thrown out of their stools and against the opposite walls in a flash. The door opened seconds later, Charlie and Rowena’s assistant running towards them in a frenzie. Sam knew Charlie was saying something to him, but the ringing in his ears was much too loud. He barely paid her any mind, however, as the searing hot pain from his chest was more than distracting. Ripping at his shirt, he exposed his chest to the cool air, causing Charlie to recoil on the floor away from him. Looking up, he saw Rowena walking towards him, stop, stare, turn back around, and run out of the door. “What happened?” He demanded, the ringing still too loud to hear Charlie’s answer. “I can’t hear you! Shit! Ow, that hurts.”

His hand felt at the red hot wound right above his heart, flinching as Rowena’s hand grabbed his wrist and pulled it away. With her other hand, she waved a large clear crystal over his face, ears popping twice and the sound returning to normal. “Can you hear me now?” He nodded. “Okay, don’t touch that.” He dropped his hand to the floor as she routed around in her apothecary case. It burned and he wanted nothing more than to hold it as he ran out of there, he did as she said. Pulling a round metal tin from the kit, she dabbed some white cream from it with a cotton tipped pad and dabbed it gently on the wound. It cooled it down instantly, soothing it like an ice pack. He sighed, relieved. “That’s never happened before. Are you all right? Can we get you a tea? A water?”

He shook his head numbly. “No, I- what do you mean never happened before?”

“I mean it’s never happened. As far as I know, ever.”

Huh. Okay, so the worst case scenario of him not finding his soulmate turned into a one in sixty billion freak accident case. Oh, okay. So he had a better chance of being hit by a train than to get his soulmate. Cool. “I don’t know what to do with this information.” He was numb. Emotionally from the news and physically numb from the cream. What  _ was _ he supposed to do with that information?

“I know what we’re going to do with it,” Charlie announced, standing up. “I’m going to authorize a full refund and cover 100% of whatever creams and tinctures you may need to help heal… that.” She didn’t gesture to the wound, but Sam knew what was up.

“I second that,” Rowena nodded to her partner, watching her go as her assistant followed closely behind. “I’m so sorry, Samuel. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened since I’ve been using this magic, and I promise you, I will find out why. Charlie and I won’t leave you without an explanation, I promise.”

Sam nodded, crying silently as she worked to cover the wound with gauze and tape, mortified. Suddenly, his second worse day was replaced from being left behind by his fourth grade teacher on a school field trip six thousand miles from home, with today, but he figured it was damn fitting.

Over the months, the burn scaled over, new skin growing back slowly, but this time, it had formed an electric purple colour. Up close, he could see the little branches of purple flowing out from the centre in tree root pattern, but from afar, it looked like a golf ball had hit him from 200 feet, leaving a sizeable bruise in its place.

He wore a shirt everywhere he went since, even to the beach with his family where Dean ribbed him on his ‘insecurity’. Dean didn’t know better. He hadn’t told his brother he even went to a matchmaker let alone how it blew up in his face. Literally. His mom knew though, and proceeded to smack the backside of her oldest son’s head.

His mother had been his rock this whole time, every second he wasn’t sleeping or at work he was sitting with her, taking her places she needed to go, even joking with Castiel that he would move back in with her to help her in her older age. It was turning less into a joke though when it had been five months without a response about the status of his weird new scar.

“Sam,” Mary gently woke her son with a hand on the shoulder as he groaned from the couch. “I know you’re resting from yesterday’s turkey fest, but someone’s on the phone for you.”

Groggy from his nap, he yawned as he took the cell from his mom. “Hello?”

“Sam, so sorry to call today, I know you’re at home with the family,” he heard Charlie’s clear voice on the other end, sitting up in anticipation. “But I didn’t want to wait to call you. Ro and I have been researching non-stop since you left in June, and I think we found the reason for the incident.”

“You did? How? What is it? Is it cuz they’re dead?”

Dean walked in with a plate of green beans, chewed obnoxiously. “Is who dead?”

“No,” Charlie stated. “When a soulmate is dead, the spell simply doesn’t glow, it just hardens to stone. No, this is very rare, but when someone’s soul is binded - that’s what we call the soulmate connection - when it’s binded to a creature of supernatural origin, the two mates will bear a mark that matches precisely in the same location on their respective bodies. It’s colour is usually red or white, depending on a case by case basis, which is why the purple was so hard to pin down. The pattern also is usually of a shape or symbol like a star or a map of Delaware or something. This is more like…”

“The roots of a tree,” he finished.

Charlie breathed out in a rush. “Yeah. We didn’t know what to make of it, so we contacted everyone we had contacts for in the industry and asked them to ask their contacts. Finally one got back to Ro with an old manuscript from the 1300’s and then long story short, we think maybe the one you’re meant to be mated with is extremely powerful and the bond will last forever. As in, don’t quote me on this, but is immortal. Either both of you will be one day, or they are.”

The phone slipped from Sam’s fingers, hitting the carpeted floor with a muffled noise, the ringing in his ears returning slowly as the information was processed in his head. He had a soulmate. He  _ had _ a  **_soulmate_ ** . Immortal or not, he didn’t care. He  _ had _ one. And they were  _ alive _ .

Dean picked up the phone and spoke with her, trying to figure out what was going on and what to do about it. Thankfully, Charlie was good at her job and didn’t tell Dean anything, so his secret was safe for now. Dean’s nagging to get to bed was exactly what he needed, and as he trudged up to his old childhood bedroom, he let his mind eel. Rowena was 300 years old and she and Charlie were together. Well, he thought they were, at least, so maybe they knew how to manage that. But then again, if they didn’t, they at least had a business together, a successful one with a three year wait list. So they knew what they were doing, at least as far as research was concerned.


End file.
